The Methuselah Syndrome
by elfin2
Summary: Fanfic based on David Weber's 'Apocalypse Troll'. Ludmilla Leonovna told how the Thuselahs got started - but what was it really like for her ancestors? Read and see.
1. Did we win the battle?

To those who haven't read the book - an alien race called the Kangas dusted the human colonial planet of Midgard with a disease that wiped out 99.8 of the population, but left the others superior to the rest of the human species. They faced prejudice, derision, hatred, envy, fear and a whole host of other problems. The survivors didn't age, so they were called Methuselahs, or Thuselahs for short.  
Generations later Colonel Ludmilla Leonovna, one of the Thuselahs, went back in time before it happened and made sure it wouldn't. That's the story in 'The Apocalypse Troll.  
But this isn't her story. This is the story of her ancestors, and of the lucky 0.2. Of the two million odd humans on Midgard at the time of the attack, there were exactly 5757 survivors.  
As Colonel Leonovna says in 'The Apocalypse Troll', the Kangas are very good at biological engineering. But not good enough. Almost, but not quite.  
  
Chapter 1: Did we win the battle?  
  
General Fitzwilliam Dafflemeier looked around at his oh-so-intelligent and very tired team.  
"Well," he demanded, "Did we win, in the final analysis, or not?"  
He wasn't speaking about the battle. The Second Battle of Midgard was over, and the planet had suffered nothing more than a few light missile strikes in strategic military regions. Certainly not the kind of mass casualties suffered in the Kanga attack on Earth.  
Four billion casualties in that one, racked against only a few thousand on the surface and twice that on destroyed or damaged ships. The blockade had very nearly held; only one light ship got through and was destroyed by ground fire.  
He was speaking of the intelligence gathering attempted before, during and after the battle.  
"Colonel Liu! Did we or did we not crack their naval codes?"  
"Yes, sir, we did, but they'll have completely changed the coding system again before they come back."  
"Are you sure?"  
"I would, sir. They used one system when they attacked Earth, and a completely different one this time. They'll have another system when they come back again. It's only common sense."  
"Alright, did they crack ours?"  
"I don't think so, sir. I've done my best to analyse their strategy; I don't think they knew what we were saying. They knew we were communicating, but not more."  
"I want your full report. I do mean full, Colonel, no more of your withholding titbits of information to look good. I want the full, complete, entire report, evidence and conclusion. Have it on my desk by 0600 tomorrow."  
"Yessir," the Colonel said a little glumly and a little sullenly.  
"Major Atarisi?"  
"Plenty of nav data," she spread her hands. "We've been stripping the information out of the captured computers as fast as we can. Right now the biggest hurdle is translation. That's the bottleneck. But we're recording it all anyway. Some of those hulks are ready to disintegrate at any moment."  
"Major Jenobi?"  
"We're still matching corpses to serial numbers, but we've got over fifteen hundred missing in space, and we're not sure which fifteen hundred they are. Six had beta-level clearance, nine eta, four delta, one alpha but given we found one of his arms wedged in an airlock I doubt he's still alive. Yes, sir, all their codes have been revoked already, before you ask. We're working as fast as we can, sir, but I doubt we can ever truly be certain the Kangas didn't get a few prisoners."  
"Keep working on it. Captain Santiago, your report on our own functioning was quite surprising."  
"I don't care much for bullshit, sir," the solidly built dark man laced his fingers together on the conference table. "Quite frankly our performance was abysmal. We couldn't locate key personnel, we couldn't establish security within the department, we couldn't confirm security of communications and that contributed to the loss of the Astoria," which had been the Terran Fleet's largest battleship and a great loss, "And the smaller inefficiencies and incompetencies defy counting. I've made a list of about six hundred already. Oh, and whoever wrote that so-called 'instant identification program' for when we've got personnel entering the building in swarms should be shot for treason. It's nothing of the kind."  
"I want a report in full…"  
"You'll have it by 1600, sir. I passed it off to my second. I can't work on it while I'm here, and she's better with computers than I am."  
"Alright." He glanced at the last person at the table. "And I see you brought a guest."  
"Yes sir. General Dafflemeier, this is First Lieutenant Anna Leonovna. She works on surveillance; she was putting together precise engineering scenarios for the new Kanga ship classes. She found something extremely worrying in the visual tapes."  
"Extremely?" The general raised his eyebrows. "And I haven't heard about it yet?"  
"My superior didn't share my concern, sir. The captain overheard me arguing with him and asked for more information." The lieutenant was perfectly calm and collected. "If I may, sir?" She gestured at the large wall screen.  
"Certainly, Lieutenant." The general blinked again as she moved to a computer terminal; modern medical science made people in wheelchairs rare, and people in wheelchairs in the military still rarer. One of her legs was slightly twisted and limp; the other was missing just above the knee. She had an interesting pattern of skin scars down that side of her body as well, visible on hand, face and neck. They didn't look like any combat scars he'd seen.  
"Most of the footage of the Kanga light cruiser that slipped past the orbital defences was taken from ground tracking stations," she said. "Early this morning I was given an amateur recording from a visiting meteorology professor. He'd disregarded all the warnings to go climbing in the hills and film cloud formations. He caught it on tape as it was coming in. There's no other visual record of that part of the ship's course; it was all remote sensor telemetry between here," she pulled up a graphics display of Midgard with two red marks, "To here." Midgard's population was almost entirely concentrated in the capital city; there were a few small towns and some outlying military facilities, but the cruiser had missed passing within a line of sight of them.  
"What did he catch we missed?" Jenobi asked.  
"This is the image - considerably enhanced, of course - he caught as it levelled off and went from mere orbital entry to true flight." An image of a dark ship flitted across the screen, almost out of frame the whole time. The backdrop of clouds was indeed fascinating, but no one was looking.  
"I didn't see it myself until I slowed the image down and tried to enhance one of the frames to examine their external communications equipment." She typed in a key to bring up a stored image. "This is a single shot, magnified and enhanced again, of the ship as it augured in."  
The same dark clunky shape - with a fine green mist coming out of an open hatch.  
"My superior, Commander Arx, insisted it was some kind of venting system. I agreed. The thing is, I don't agree that what they were venting was unwanted chemicals of some kind or engine exhaust. For one thing, that wouldn't be green. I think they dusted us with a biological weapon." 


	2. Biological warfare

Chapter 2: Biological warfare  
  
That brought stunned silence to the table, followed by a considerable babble. The general slammed his hands down.  
"Defend your conclusion, Lieutenant," he said.  
"The data supports no other conclusion, sir. I ran every test on the image I could, given the type of camera and the quality. The substance vented was small solid particles, I'd guess less than one millimetre in diameter. A powder, sir, not a gas. It was vented out a hatch that is too small for a Kanga, and serves no purpose I can see in terms of ship structure. But the real kicker for me was the infra-red. The venting was colder than the surrounding air - less than ten degrees centigrade. Everything I can think of Kangas might vent would be hotter than that. Besides, if we're storing biological weapons, we usually freeze or refrigerate them so they don't breed until we want them to."  
"Holy shit," one of the officers said.  
"Exactly how old is this, Leonovna?"  
"The information - less than two hours, sir. The film was taken," she glanced at her watch, "Nearly six days ago now, sir."  
"So if there is a biological weapon…"  
She hit another key. "This is the original dispersion, sir. I did my best to track it using the meteorological records. This is a day later." The red cloud lay over more than half the human settlements. "Two days." Worse. "Three." Worse still. "Four." More than half the planet. Six tiny mining settlements in the southern hemisphere were still untainted. "Five." One settlement left untainted. "And as of about an hour ago." The entire planet, save for a few spots at the polar caps, was red.  
"How solid is this projection?" Liu asked quickly.  
"It's guess-work, sir. It's an old program, used to track airborne pollution. Stuff produced on the ground. I'm not a meteorologist. But if you give my figures to one, you'll get something you can take to the bank. It won't be certain, because I had to make too many guesses about the variables involved for the powder. Incidentally, sir, that was one of the better scenarios from our point of view. Nearly half of them came out as every human settlement being affected before 0400 yesterday morning."  
Looks were swapped. "Lieutenant, in your opinion, is it possible to produce a biological weapon that would wipe out every human being on the planet?"  
"Yes, sir, but they wouldn't need to. They'd only need to come up with one that would kill, say, nine in ten and would never die out. We'd have to abandon the planet, and they could use it again. We know they took live prisoners during the First Battle of Midgard; they would have had them to experiment on." A brief expression of distaste, the first flicker of emotion she'd shown, passed across her features and was gone. "Less than two minutes before I came in here I pulled the latest satellite photos from across the cruiser's flight path. I found something very worrying, and I don't think it's coincidence." She flicked a finger again.  
"That swathe is almost directly under the path of the dust released from the cruiser, allowing for the wind on that day. That swathe of brown colour is dying plants. Not Midgardian plants, they're fine so far as I can see on brief inspection, but that entire stretch of hills had been seeded with Terran plant life, preparatory to giving veterans land grants to farm the area. Those plants are wilting and dying right now." Now she had everyone's attention. "If they wanted to wipe us all out and leave the planet suitable for them, they only need to create something that attacks DNA. Both the Kangas and the native life forms use different genetic material and amino acids. And this powder is everywhere. Whatever it carried, it's going to hit us in a few days at best."  
Appalled looks were exchanged. "And your commander didn't think this was important?" Atarisi said incredulously.  
"I hadn't finished correlating the weather reports, I was still analysing the infrared and I hadn't pulled the surveillance photos at the time, sir. Commander Arx is… somewhat conservative in some ways."  
"That's a mild term for the man," Captain Santiago growled. General Dafflemeier closed his eyes. "Alright. Santiago, dump the internal stuff on your XO, put together a team, and have her on it. Anything you need, you can have until we confirm or deny this threat."  
"Right, sir. I'll put in a top-priority alert to all the medical facilities for starters."  
"And crop watchers, farmers, there's hotlines for plant diseases," Leonovna said. "My parents are farmers. I know. And vets. I'll pull a few analysts off ship designs and put them onto surveillance."  
"I'll grab a meteorologist with the right clearance," Santiago said. "Sir, if she's right, we'll need to put out a quarantine the instant we've confirmed it if not before."  
"Well, no ships in this system are due to leave, but three left yesterday for Earth. Cargo ships and freighters."  
"I'll check what contact they had with the surface," Jenobi said. "As of five minutes ago. With your permission, sir?"  
"Go," General Dafflemeier said. "All of you. No, Leonovna, stay a moment." 


	3. Losing the war

Chapter 3: Losing the war  
  
"Do you honestly believe the Kangas would do this?"  
"Yes, sir. Both my parents were the only survivors of their families after the attack on Earth. My stepmother still had her family, but she was on Manhattan when the bombs fell and was the only survivor out of a group of over nine hundred people she knew. Four billion deaths, sir. The Kangas don't want to do a precision strike on our military. They want to wipe out our species. You can't reason with that. They'd do it, sir."  
"You're taking this pretty calmly."  
"I've always been phlegmatic, sir."  
"If you don't mind me asking…"  
"The legs, sir? Everyone wonders that."  
"I'll admit, I was curious."  
"During my third year at the Academy - well, you know the 'Feast of the Survivors'?"  
"Sure. We did that when I went through on Earth. After third year battle manoeuvres, you have a party to celebrate not washing out."  
"Yes, sir. On Midgard it's a bit more informal - my friends and I referred to it as our biannual piss-up. When the officers weren't around, of course."  
"Of course." She did have a sense of humour, just a dry one, he decided.  
"I volunteered to stay sober, because someone had to get everyone home after we went pub-crawling. We were crossing a side-street when an out-of-control air truck came through. My step-brother, who was in the same year as me, wasn't able to move out of the way fast enough because he'd hurt his leg during the manoeuvres. I threw him out of the way onto the sidewalk, but didn't have time to dodge myself. The truck knocked me down and ran over me full-tilt."  
"Did the police catch the driver?"  
"Yes. He's still in jail. I was rushed to the hospital, but one of my legs was crushed so badly they had to amputate and my spinal cord was severed too badly to fix or splice. They told me I'd be paralysed from the neck down for life. I got the use of my arms back in spite of that and did the next year and a half of academic studying from the hospital after refusing a medical discharge."  
"And you wound up in intelligence?"  
"I'm a genius, sir, and a cynic. That's not boasting, sir," she caught his look. "It's fact. I was eighteen when I got into the academy and I had a Masters in spacecraft design then. I now have a Masters in electronics as well and I'm working on another in computers. I know what I'm capable of."  
"Are you capable of mistakes?"  
"Of course, sir. But I don't think I'm making one right now. This isn't a conclusion I jumped to, General. It's a conclusion I tried desperately to disprove. I don't want it to be true, sir. I may be crippled, but I'm still not ready to die."  
"Good. Don't die, Lieutenant, and that's an order. Now get to work and try to prove you made a mistake. And if that Commander Arx of yours comes trying to steal you back, tell him to come see me. I've heard nothing but bad things about him."  
"Yes, sir. I'll do that." Again the faintest hint, just the tiniest flicker of humour, then it was gone and her chair whirred out the door.  
General Fitzwilliam Dafflemeier stared at the image of dead grasses still showing on the screen, tapping his fingertips on the plastic table. "Did we just lose the war?" He asked of the empty room. "Damn." 


	4. Plaguelike symptoms

Chapter 4: Plague-like symptoms  
  
"Excuse me, Doctor Right?" Amyus Right looked up from the printed message in his hand.  
"Yes, Nurse Matsugae?"  
"I'm sorry to disturb you, sir, but we've got thirteen people in the waiting room with the same symptoms - intense hunger, dizziness, trouble breathing, and nine of them say they've lost weight in the last two days. Why, is there something wrong?"  
Iriina Matsugae had been a floor nurse for nearly forty years, and she had seldom seen doctors look so scared. Worried, plenty of times, especially the doctors who knew their patients well, or were sensitive, but not scared.  
"Show me," he demanded, still holding the printed message.  
She led him quickly down to the emergency room where a number of people were having trouble breathing, gasping for air. One was coughing blood into a bowl.  
A nurse in stained surgical scrubs came running in and skidded on a freshly mopped bit of tiled floor. "Sorry," she bounced off a wall and kept going like a champion. "Doctor Right? We've got five kids in the pediatric ward with the same symptoms, and I just got a call from a friend at the twenty-six hour centre on the other side of the city. He's got six people in with the same symptoms. He wants to know what special drugs to prescribe and if we know any more than he does."  
"Actually, yes. Maysie! Maysie Kellinger, give me that phone." He grabbed the phone of the secretary who had been complaining to the hospital's bread supplier about mould. "Hey, that's important!"  
"So's this." He dialled frantically. "Yes, I need to speak to Captain Santiago right now." He covered the spearker. "Maysie, contact every doctor on the staff with experience in epidimiology and call in all volunteer staff for an emergency briefing. Yes, I need to speak to him right now, and it's an emergency," he said the last sentence into the phone. "I don't care if he's Mercury getting a suntan, you can get him on the phone for me."  
"What's going on, Right?" The portly Doctor D'Urville, head of the Emergency Medical Centre, looked extremely irate.  
Right wordlessly handed over the crumpled piece of paper. "Yes, Captain Santiago? This is Doctor Right at Midgard General. I've got nineteen people with identical symptoms and six more at the other twenty-four hour place across town. Oh, make that twenty-two - three more just walked in the door. Yes, that's twenty-eight total. Dizziness, difficulty breathing and intense hunger. You wanted to know about people with… hold on a second."  
The elderly man who had been coughing up blood had fallen to the floor and started to convulse. Nurses and doctors converged on the man like flies to a carcass, calling instructions and demands, but within thirty seconds the man was no longer breathing.  
"Are you still there, Doctor Right?" Came the voice from the speaker.  
"Yes. One of our patients just died in our lobby." Right waited. "Alright. I'll pass the word. If we just quarantine… they did WHAT?"  
Everyone turned to look except for the staff administering recussitation.  
"What?" Another pause. "Oh, hell. D'Urville! C'mere." He lowered his voice. "The military wants to declare a quarantine."  
"This building is the city's largest hospital - we can't do that!"  
"Not on the hospital. On the planet. This bloke thinks the Kangas dropped a biological weapon on us. He sent that call out to report any plague-like symptoms, numbers of similar symptoms… I think this qualifies." A group of people burst through the doors carrying a young woman on a board. She would have been pretty, except for the way her face was turning blue and she was gasping for air, clawing at her chest.  
"We need a doctor!" One of them called, then looked around and paled. "Oh, Allah be merciful."  
"Fat chance of that," Right muttered. "Call in the quarantine, D'Urville." 


	5. Rules and regulations

Chapter 5: Rules and regulations

"What do you mean, I'm not allowed to leave orbit?" Captain Thaddeus Clark of the Astral Pride spat into his microphone. "I have a delivery contract to meet! Who's going to pay the defaulter's fee"  
"We have declared a planetary emergency and a Class 1 planetary quarantine. No one leaves. No one arrives. Please reference your legal manual for details." The speaker had such a flat inflectionless voice Clark wondered if he was talking to a robot.  
"I am going to leave port at our scheduled departure time of 1900 hours," he said. "That's in nine minutes, thirty-seven seconds"  
"Uh, sir?" His first officer tried to interrupt.  
"You will not be permitted to leave orbit, Astral Pride," the voice said.  
"Sir"  
"Shut up, Perks! Now listen to me, you little"  
"Sir!" He jerked around in fury. "Sir, the Justinian is targeting us with long-range nuclear missiles"  
"You will cease and desist all attempts to leave orbit," the speaker droned on. "You will cease and desist all attempts to target my ship"  
"Under a Class 1 quarantine military and emergency personnel may take whatever steps are judged necessary to prevent spread of infection"  
"They will shoot us, sir," his purser said. The petite Asian lady knew her business better than the captain did. "The last time anyone declared a Class 1 was for that outbreak of variant smallpox on Mars just before Midgard was settled. Six shuttles that tried to launch after it was declared were blown up before they left the atmosphere. They're not kidding around"  
"We are going to keep that contract"  
Ting sighed and leaned her head against her console. "Sir, need I remind you of the contract sections dealing with quarantine regulations? Anyone in this room would be within their rights to kill you if you attempted to take this ship out of dock, and it would be ruled justifiable homicide and no charges would be filed. Oh, and it would invalidate your life insurance policy. Not only that, but you would instantly forfeit your job and all your wages which are as yet unpaid, your captain's licence, your spacing rights, your flight clearance and quite possibly your freedom as attempts to violate those sections carry a standard penalty of nineteen years. Set against that, our delivery date is really quite insignificant"  
The XO could see the captain wavering and bit his tongue.  
"I don't want to stay here to die," he growled. That idea frightened him.  
"Well, sir, if the disease they've declared a quarantine for is on board there's nothing we can do about it. Running won't help. On the other hand, if it isn't, we can just shut the airlocks, switch to internal pressure and wait. So long as we don't try to go anywhere and the airlocks stay sealed, we'll be fine legally and have the best chance we've got medically." She glanced at the clock. "Coming up on 1900, sir. Better decide fast"  
He scowled and glared, caught between two dilemmas. For an eternity the bridge crew waited to know if they would be blown out of the sky - and existence - by their own military.  
Captain Clark flipped a switch. The engines powered down to 'idle.  
"Justinian no longer targeting us, sir," a junior officer said.  
"I hope you're right, Ting," he growled. "If you're not, you just killed us all"  
"Yessir," she said and returned to her board. 


End file.
